Kuomintang Wins Taiwanese Presidency

Democracy is alive and well in China, if one counts Taiwan as China. The island of 23 million held elections over the weekend and chose Ma Ying-jeou, a former Taipei mayor, as its new president. He handily defeated, Frank Hsieh of the Democratic Progressive Party by about 17% of the vote. While the economy was the issue that turned out Mr. Hsieh, relations with the communist dictatorship in Beijing make the election of Mr. Ma vital to the world.

Since Mao defeated Chiang Kai-Shek in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Taiwan and Beijing have shared a fiction that there is but one China. Each claims to rule the entire lot, but in fact, the two are bitter rivals, and war is never far from the surface. In the election campaign, both major candidates sought to move Taiwan away from a direct confrontation with Beijing. Mr. Ma opted for “mutual non-denial”, by which he meant “we will not deny their [the ChiComs] existence but we cannot recognize their sovereignty” over Taiwan.

This is vastly better for the world than the ideas of arch-nationalist Chen Shui-bian, the outgoing president. For him and his ilk, Taiwan is an independent nation (true enough), and it must be recognized as such by Beijing (pointless and unlikely). It was just a matter of getting it to happen.

The Beijing dictatorship currently has about 1,000 short range missiles pointed at Taiwan, and it is hard to imagine a PRC attack on Taiwan going unnoticed by the US. So any action that makes the hotheaded militarists in Beijing nervous is unwelcome. Taiwan is a free and independent state, and so long as no one actually says so, the world can sleep peacefully.

And so the election of Mr. Ma is a very big deal indeed. Upon his election, he said, “I will make it crystal clear that Taiwan will be a stakeholder and will not rock the boat in the region. By stakeholder, I mean peacemaker.” Yet there is something about a wealthy, successful democracy on Taiwan that inherently threatens the ChiCom regime.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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